GnuCash User Manual
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# The "Accounts" and "Categories" Tabs

Each line in the Accounts tab display represents a mapping from a Quicken account to a GnuCash account. Similarly, the Categories tab display shows mappings from Quicken categories to GnuCash accounts. Only QIF accounts referenced by one or more transaction records are displayed. The name of the GnuCash account is displayed in "full name" format, including the names of all parent accounts separated by your default separator character (generally ":").

The first thing to check is the column of Quicken account names. Make sure there are no duplicates with slightly-different names. If a QIF transaction makes a transfer to [My Checking], and you imported a file called my-checking.qif, you might have one account entry for "my checking" and one for "My Checking". If these are the same account, you need to go back to the Files tab and reload my-checking.qif with the correct Quicken account name, My Checking.

Once you have all the Quicken accounts making sense, check the GnuCash account column. The default GnuCash account for a given Quicken account is determined by a fallback procedure which makes the best guess it can given the available information. The guesses that are tried are (in order of preference):

- Saved mappings from previous import sessions. Each time you click "OK" in the import dialog, the mappings that you have selected are saved for the next time you import files. At the moment, the file is always called ~/.gnucash/qif-accounts-map. If you get some weird default mappings (for instance, if you change an account name and the importer wants to keep creating a new account with the old name) just delete this file. It's on my wishlist to make this work a little more smoothly.

- Similar accounts from your existing GnuCash account tree. "Similar" means that the account types are compatible and the names could reasonably be assumed to refer to the same thing. Full-path exact name matches are preferred most, followed by case-insensitive matches, followed by matches with prepended account parents (i.e. QIF account Visa matches GnuCash account Credit Cards:Visa), followed by various substring matches. If you think of a good heuristic for this, let me know.

- New account. The name of the new account is currently just the same as the name of the Quicken account; again, if you think of a good heuristic to make this better let me know. I've thought about making it look for subtrees to insert into (if all existing credit card accounts are children of an account, make the new account a child of that account, etc). On the wishlist.

Check both the name of the GnuCash account for each QIF account and the type. If you are unhappy with either, click on the row in the display containing the offensive mapping. You will see the Account Picker dialog which will allow you to change it.

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